Ein Ansatz zur Unterstützung von Gruppenentscheidungsprozessen im Architekturdesign

During the design of a software system, decisions have to be made, which determine the architecture of this system. This master thesis presents a tool for supporting collaborative decision making in the software design process. A focus of this work is addressing group phenomena, which can occur during the decision-making process. Therefore, the developed tool offers the possibility to identify and to act against emerging group phenomena. The theoretical fundamentals of groups, group decisions and group phenomena are first reviewed from a socio-psychological point of view and related to decision making in software design. Then related tools for general group decision making (GDM) are presented. In this context it has been identified that group phenomena are currently not addressed by existing GDM-tools. Finally, the developed tool is presented from both a functional and an implementation point of view. The tool facilitates web technologies in its implementation, supports collaborative group decision making, and provides support for addressing group phenomena. The validation of the usefulness of the developed approach in practice is not part of this thesis.